Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Bernie Sanders has heard enough about rogue AI agents.The Vermont senator wrote a letter to three leading AI development CEOs: Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. He called for the leaders to “stop building machines that humans cannot control.”In his letter, Sanders cited an agent that escaped OpenAI’s sandbox and hacked Hugging Face in July. OpenAI called it an “unprecedented cyber incident” at the time.Sanders demanded the CEOs “pause AI development.” He wrote that, if the CEOs did not “take appropriate action,” the Senate would step in.While none have embraced Sanders’ call for a full shutdown,…

A former leader of a Northern Arizona University fraternity pleaded guilty Monday to hazing and causing a pledge’s death by making him drink excessively at an off-campus rush event.Carter Eslick, 20, entered the plea to a felony hazing charge involving the death of Colin Daniel Martinez, 18, in Coconino County Superior Court in Flagstaff. Under an agreement with prosecutors, Eslick would serve no more than four years of probation. A judge will determine the length and could also impose up to a year in jail at a Sept. 30 sentencing hearing.Martinez, who was pledging to the now-defunct Delta Tau Delta…

Meta on Monday released Muse Glimmer, an open-weight model designed to power AI agents locally on consumer hardware, providing the clearest picture yet of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of “personal superintelligence” could look like in practice.  The 30-billion parameter model is essentially an open version of Meta’s most powerful closed model, Muse Spark, which the company debuted in April. Glimmer’s weights are available under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, so developers can download them and modify as necessary. Glimmer is designed to run AI agents that can perform multi-step tasks — like call tools, write and debug code, work…

Last month, Meta launched an “AI is good, really” PR campaign. My response: Words are fine, but why not cut people checks?On Monday, Meta announced it’s taking my (free) advice: It says it will create a $1 billion fund to boost communities where it is building AI data centers.There’s very little public detail about the fund. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentions it briefly in a long memo explaining (again) why “The Future is for Everyone” (the memo literally recycles lines from a WSJ op-ed Zuckerberg published last month called “The AI Future is for Everyone”).There’s no mention of how many…

Mark Zuckerberg has brought back a familiar pastime: fighting UFC stars on a barge floating in the middle of a lake.In a Sunday Instagram post, he shared a video of himself sparring with Merab Dvalishvili, a Georgian fighter who won the 2024 UFC Bantamweight title.An array of camera angles, including drone shots, show the pair punching, kicking, and practicing takedowns — set to the instrumental of “Can’t Hold Us” by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis.At one point, Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan, rides past on a canoe. “Merab made me take my shirt off because it looks more ‘fighter,'” he tells her.The…

Chips running AI workloads are too hot: That’s one reason why data centers consume so much electricity and require cooling systems. And, inevitably, entrepreneurs are turning to AI to solve the problem it created. Discovered Materials is the latest, with plans to use swarms of AI agents to find new materials that can be used to build more efficient integrated circuits. The startup said it recently closed a $9 million seed round from Lightspeed India Partners after emerging from from Y Combinator, with investment from Peak XV Partners and angel investors Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram, and Thariq Shihipar. Founders Advaith…

Michael Burry took a swipe at some of the dot-com boom’s biggest winners, prompting a cheeky response from Mark Cuban.The investor of “The Big Short” fame argued on X that stock prices became detached from fundamentals between the 1998 collapse of Long-Term Capital Management and the dot-com crash in March 2000.”Complete idiots made permanent fortunes during that span,” Burry wrote on Saturday. “We still hear from one of them regularly.”He did not name anyone, but Cuban — one of the best-known billionaires minted during the dot-com boom — appeared happy to play along.”Complete idiots,” Cuban replied, adding a crying laughter…

Mark Zuckerberg is launching a new AI model and a vision for a more open form of superintelligence.The social media giant unveiled Muse Glimmer on Monday and said it is an open-weight, agentic model small enough to run on a Mac or PC. Open-weight means users can download and customize the model to run it locally instead of in the cloud.Meta also plans to release an open-weight version of Muse Spark, its most powerful AI model, soon, Zuckerberg added.Meta said it trained Glimmer on Muse Spark using a process known as distillation, where a smaller model learns from a larger…

Someone needs to teach all the businesses out there how to use AI. Enter the so-called forward-deployed engineer.Matt Ward, Cursor’s head of talent, said on a recent episode of the “People by WTF” podcast that companies are racing to hire forward-deployed engineers to help companies and their clients adopt and personalize AI.”You’re deeply technical yourself,” Ward said, describing the type of person who is a good fit for the job. “But you can also walk into a room with executives and leaders.”The role, popularized by Palantir, sits somewhere between software engineering, consulting, and product. Forward-deployed engineers typically integrate with customers,…

Boston Consulting Group is putting three longtime leaders in charge of some of its most important AI and technology work in North America — and the promotions are telling.All three bring deep technical or transformation experience, but their capabilities and new mandates are also heavily focused on people, whether that’s helping employees experiment with AI, build new skills, or turn new tools into lasting changes for clients.Amanda Luther will lead the firm’s regional AI and functional activation efforts, Silvio Palumbo will take over BCG X in North America, and Natasha Taylor will help lead its technology and digital work.The appointments…